Chicago to track cell phones with streetlight poles

The city of Chicago is getting ready to deploy several monitoring stations on light poles along Michigan Avenue. In addition to collecting environmental information like sound volume, light intensity, and air quality, the devices will also count people by detecting wireless signals from passing mobile devices.

The system is designed to only count devices without capturing unique identifiers. While this may be true, it would certainly be easy to change in the future with only a tiny tweak to the software.

Capturing this kind of data is inevitable, and would be invisible if the city had not announced its intentions. The key will be to ensure appropriate protections for collected information, whoever does the collecting. It is refreshing that all of the data captured as part of this project will be published immediately. Assuming nothing is held back that will give a clear sense of exactly what kinds of information can be extrapolated from the raw data.i

Additionally architectural changes like the random MAC addresses in iOS 8 can significantly improve privacy in the face for such monitoring and tracking.